Friday, September 11, 2015

So here it is. My next post after a quite notable pause. I can't tell why I stopped writing - and sketching, unfortunately - the last months but there was pretty much to process thus I didn't write a thing here. But that's no worthy beginning, so let's start with that:

His fertile & animated imagination rises, falls, travels through all tones and subjects. The most vivid and true paintings, the finest and most gay critiques, the richness of poetry, the seductions of eloquence, the sweetest emanations of morality and sentiment flow without order, one after the other, from his smooth, natural and abandoned pen.

Journal encyclopédique, 1 August 1786

No, they don't talk about my sense of writing phenomenally and they neither talk about gay people. Instead, they are talking serious, or not so serious, literature that changed the way we read today. Let me introduce to you Ladies and GentlemanVoltaire did not like it that much but I do. Probably he was just jealous that Sterne was allowed, or allowed himself, to play in the streets of his conscience, calling it narrative strategy.

So one could take a look at the two priests in literary history: Rabelais and his honorable successor Laurence Sterne.

So guess who's who. One of them lived 200 years earlier and has a hat. Well, I guess you could tell anyway that the left one is the younger fellow because he has no beard. Obviously. While I am staring at both of them right now with them staring back at me, I am thinking about who is the more handsome guy (my facial expression is just as skeptical and doubting as theirs) and which one of them made the nuns of their time giggle in church? Would either of them have liked to be decently touched, like under the skirt, in a narrow hallway .. let's say, in New Saint Peter's Basilica? Well that's not my phantasy, it's rather Michelangelo's innocent worries in view of Bramante's concept for the church's re-building in the early 1500's. Shame on you, Bramante, you did not think well in advance. And as Sterne put it in words just as accurately as usual:

" then you whispered me in the ear **** ** **** ** **** ** **** **

Every other man would have wished the ground would swallow him up. "

He impressively uses the modern beep-tone in a very appropriate manner. Censorship is and was a big deal throughout all times but such a modern approach and lookahead to our times is rarely found.

He pretty much experiments with everything: with the rules of his time, the decorum of earlier times (and how much he can provoke the ones who are still desperate for order and hierarchy), the capability of the book as a medium and the requirement of a (calm) layout - which he disturbs, interrupts, shatters and fractures with simple black boxes on one page or switching to forms and shapes instead of coherent words that one knows on another. He does not give space for illusions of any kind, whether it is a mimetic narration or the shaky fiction that a layout can get hold of the chaos, giving it a concrete and tangible form. As I read in an article about Sterne's work:

Perhaps a writer has the obligation to write about the areas of life that we don't have profound knowledge about in order to make them part of our reality which, in this case, is our imagination.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

today i have a special thing for y'all (sorry. i just like this american accent you here in all the movies..). actually, i should say bonjour, je voudrais presentée le fanzine Irène, publicée des trois femmes francaises. huh, that was a tough start. it's quite a long time now that i've last written a thing in french. maybe i should refresh that..let's start with the five first covers of that magazine:

i really like that they don't look like cheap, tasteless erotic magazines; instead they more appear like literary magazines or great photo essays.

the last three are covers for the fifth issue.. i think that the left one is the chosen cover but i'm not sure about that. i think i like the other both better..especially the right one which seems to deal with eroticism and nudity in a very playful/naive(?)/informal and gentle way. i don't know if you can call it 'flimsy' but i really like that word.

this is their website which consist of the endless photo stream of tumblr .

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

i know. i'm late. again. i had to work the whole day yesterday and i was too exhausted to write a post. but i am sure it's still tuesday somewhere in the world ... right, no excuse. well, i just blog today and i don't really think that anyone cares except me but i want to take my promise to myself seriously, so i feel bad about not posting on tuesday for the second time. anyway, i just start because i have a very nice thing to write about today: a new magazine that i've found just a few clicks ago.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

i'm sorry for not posting yesterday. there's very much up in my mind the last couple of weeks which i wanted to deal with first. but as a little sorry-gift, i created a playlist (what else can say "sorry"as good as music can do?!) you'll recognize that it's kind of rock-orientated but there are some other gems in there, too.

i made this playlist on youtube, so you don't have to search for every single one of these songs on your own.

you can find 3OH!3 in there which is a band that made me very happy and euphoric on our trip to a german festival and our roadtrip to sweden. yep, actually i can sing along with nearly every song of them. i don't differ between stupid and great lyrics .. i sing my own lyrics mostly all the time anyway ..

then there's this song "losing my religion"by R.E.M. which is my car-song since i got my license. i just wanted to have a car-song, so i turned up the radio on my first alone-and-adult-and-overall-just-damn-cool-drive and the radio really spit out a great song. i guess, i can call me lucky that my parents who own the car mostly listen to old stations. otherwise, i could have get a david guetta song which i have to love.. because i wanted to love my car-song.. i'm a lucky girl that destiny picked R.E.M. for me!

the other songs are mainly rock classics that i love to sing along to, including Fleetwood Mac's "go your own way" which i discovered just a few days ago. i have one of their albums on vinyl but it's not "Rumours" which is the album that song is on. so i will go on a flea market hunt this weekend, hopefully finding that album on vinyl!

wish me luck!

cheers,

alina

p.s. these are screenshots of two websites that are definitely helpful and visually beautiful (!) when it comes to travel and road trips. i would suggest all of you to take a look at Miles & Miles and Observant Nomad.

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about

I am in search of my philosophy, studying art history and comparative literature. Directly after finishing school, I studied communication design for a year. That's probably why this site looks so good hihi